Thursday, January 31, 2013

First, let’s get this out of the
way. I’ll occasionally review films on this blog. These films will probably not
be in theaters, because, as a dad, it’s hard for me to get away and go to a
theater. The films I review could be recent films, or they could be downright
ancient films. They just happen to be movies that I’ve recently seen and find
interesting. I’m a critic on a shoestring budget, armed only with a Netflix
account.

Now, this brings us to Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, which premiered last
June, but I only saw it recently. Much ink has already been spilled over what
Anderson himself has referred to as his “handwriting,” that is the unique imprimatur
that he puts on his films. We recognize, over his seven features, the same filmmaking
that relies upon pans and long shots. We recognize a pallet of basic colors
that have a warm, vintage look to them, as if shot in Kodachrome. We see the
same characters, typically men but occasionally women, rebelling in their
ineffectual deadpan way against the tidy, tweedy, oak paneled, tennis courted world
of the patrician eastern seaboard bourgeoisie.

Bottle
Rocket has men pretending to be boys, pretending to be criminals. Rushmore has boys pretending to be men,
pretending to be criminals. Darjeeling Limited
has men who have remained boys, but pretend to be men. Masculinity and the
lampooning of traditional masculinity play an important role in these films,
and Moonrise Kingdom is no exception.

However, with Moonrise and 2009’s Fantastic
Mr. Fox, Anderson embraces traditional masculinity as redemptive,
empowering, and noble, while still camping on that idea. His previous films
portray masculinity as a kind of grail quest doomed to failure that has been undertaken
by misguided, ill-equipped boy/men. Darjeeling
has adult men who have remained boys and fail to even commit to the quest of
redemptive adult manhood, because masculinity, in their case, can never be
achieved. In Life Aquatic you have a middle-aged
man, played by Anderson perennial Bill Murray, who has made a living out of
appearing to be a virile, adventuresome tough-guy, but has now grown weary of
the callow form of masculinity that he shallowly used as a façade for most of
his adult life.

Not so with Moonrise. This is a story about a twelve year old boy who successfully
rebels against his unhappy circumstances as an orphan and a foster child. He runs
away from the play-acting of traditional masculinity that happens at the Khaki
Scout summer camp that he’s staying at, and he embraces true masculinity by
surviving by his wits and hard work in the wilderness of the real world. He
also rescues, in valiant fashion, his twelve year old girlfriend from her
unhappy, intellectual, patrician, eastern seaboard parents, and forms a
powerful bond with her that is strengthened, not weakened, by their respective traditional
gender identities.

Anderson knows that he can’t tell
this story with a straight-face, because it would be dismissed as hopelessly
old-fashioned by jaded modern audiences, so he invests the film with his fey,
ironical imprimatur. The girl’s house only resembles a real house. It is a kind
of life-size dollhouse. Each scene is stuffed full of kitschy, campy vintage
artifacts that form a pastiche of 21st century culture with 1960’s
culture. Everything is the platonic stand-in for the aesthetic ideal. A car is
not a car, but a “car.” A boat is never a boat, but a “boat.” The setting of
the story itself is a fantastic, mythical place that only resembles reality. It
is the Moonrise Kingdom, a place somewhere between night and day; a place that
resembles the dour, difficult world of struggling adults, but is invested with
the whimsy and imagination of childhood.

Wes Anderson: The Titan of Twee

Indeed, the films of Wes Anderson,
and increasingly twee culture as a whole, function as a form of wish-fulfillment
for the restoration of traditionally defined gender roles, and a return to a prelapsarian
childhood idyll. The characters in Moonrise
pursue old-fashioned love ironically because they are children, and because
they live in a fantasy world where those ideals are possible. Fantastic Mr. Fox fights off the bad
guys, provides for his wife and children, and dutifully protects his community,
but he can only do this in a stop-motion animated world populated by talking
animals.

This marks a change in Anderson’s
filmmaking. He is no longer interested in showing directionless men in their thirties
floundering in a boyhood that was never allowed to happen because of
domineering, achievement oriented parents. The main character in Moonrise is a prematurely adult kid who
eagerly wants the responsibility of a husband, and probably a father, but he is
stuck in a world where that noble undertaking is impossible. Wes Anderson,
artistically, is no longer a boy trapped in a man’s body, but a man trapped in a
world that refuses to grow up; a world that can only be appealed to with the escapism
and moral evasion of irony and caricature.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

I
am currently reading Dr. Carroll Quigley’s landmark 1966 book, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in
our Time. This is a history book that covers the major events of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries up until almost the time of the book’s publication. It
is also a favored text for conspiracy researchers because a small portion of
the book is devoted to the foundation of influential policy groups by major
forces in the world of financial capitalism. The goal of these policy groups
was, and is, nothing less than to manage the economies of every country in the
world using the leverage of central banking.

These revelations are really only a
small portion of a very exhaustive (1348 pgs.) political history provided by an
interpretative historian, but the discovery of the machinations of these
financial scions is immensely valuable because Dr. Quigley discovered their objectives
through exclusive access to primary documents. He was granted access to the complete
records of the Council on Foreign Relations, which have now been made public,
and the records of its even more secretive parent group The Round Table in the
early 1960’s. This access was granted to him, no doubt, because he was an establishment
intellectual who was writing a book that puts world government by bankers and technocrats
in a mostly favorable light. Although Dr. Quigley disagrees with the secrecy
and subterfuge employed by the global elite, it’s clear that he has no problem
with world government controlled by experts, per se.

Dr. Quigley’s research reveals the
Council on Foreign Relations as a front group for the powerful Anglophile
secret society known variously as the Round Table or the Milner group, after
one of its founders, Lord Alfred Milner. This group was headed by various
figures emanating from JP Morgan’s circle of influence and is described by Dr.
Quigley as “cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern
seaboard, high Episcopalian, and European-culture conscious.” (937) In short, a
secretive power bloc emanating from the WASP upper echelons much like the Order
of Skull in Bones as researched by Dr. Antony Sutton.

This group maintained members in editorial
positions at some of America’s most prestigious magazines and newspapers
including “The New York Times, New
York’s Herald Tribune, The Christian
Science Monitor, and The Washington
Post.” (953) Their members also headed the powerful Institute of Pacific
Relations in the 1950’s, an influential, communist-leaning think tank that sent
some of its members to important State Dept. appointments. Dr. Quigley
reluctantly speculates that due to the IPR’s influence, the way was eased for
the communists’ accession in China after the defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek.

Curiously, given his overwhelming
evidence of a conspiracy headed by banking elites and their tax exempt foundations,
Dr. Quigley dismisses the idea that these men have designs for world hegemony.
He summarily dismisses these notions as the pabulum of paranoid, right-wing, “professional
anti-communists.” He insists that these men are using their vast fortunes in
good faith, and he lovingly describes them as merely “gracious and cultured
gentlemen of somewhat limited social experience who were much concerned with
the freedom of expression of minorities and the rule of law for all.” (954)

This apologetic point-of-view is all
the more confusing given Dr. Quigley’s grim outlook on the world’s future that
reads today like prophecy. He writes that “in the twentieth century, the expert
will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the economic system even as he
will replace the democratic voter in control of the political system. . . (the
private citizen’s) freedom of choice will be controlled within very narrow
alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a
number, through his educational training, his required military or public
service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his
final retirement and death benefits.” (866)

The role of the Council on Foreign
Relations in our present government cannot be overstated. Obama's White House
is loaded with lifetime members of the organization including Susan Rice, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, and Stephen Flynn. In 2009, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton had this to say about the opening of the CFR’s Washington office near
the White House, “We get a lot of advice from the Council (on Foreign
Relations), so this will mean I won’t have as far to go to be told what we
should be doing and how we should think about the future.”

Dr. Carroll Quigley

Private citizens should take a vigilant
interest in the influence of tax exempt foundations, think tanks, and banking
institutions on their government. Doing so may mean the difference between
living as constitutionally protected, free individuals or as a numerical value
to be taxed, controlled, and propagandized to by a shadowy technocratic oligarchy.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

Hello and welcome, friends, to
Iconoclasm Today! the occasional blog of news, opinion, , and culture that is
also a testament to my personal neuroses. I am Michael Gillham. I find myself
here in the early twenty-first century in a mountainous backwater of the United
States during the twilight of the American Empire. I am an aspiring member of
the intellectual bureaucracy, an earnest, hard-working drudge of the American
peasantry attempting, in my plucky Dickensian fashion, to ply an entry into the
lower echelons of the chattering classes. I am a young man looking to win my
way into the parasitic intellectual professions that keep America afloat with
an inexhaustible supply of inky, indecipherable bullshit. I am talking, of
course, about the opportunistic league of writers, intellectuals, and college
professors that the State employs to delude the young that their futures are in
good hands and assure them that they are special snowflakes, safe and free at
last in the most enlightened society that was ever engineered. It is necessary
to preoccupy the intellectual with pedagogical position because a person who
thinks for themselves is a public menace who must have his ego massaged by a
bureaucratic architecture lest he harass and disturb the decent and industrious
public.

I hold a Master’s degree in English
which qualifies me to do next to nothing in an economy eviscerated by public
debt and imperial corruption; an economy now primarily propped up by hale,
optimistic, ruddy complected Protestants largely incapable of independent
thought who serve a parasitic class of lawyers, intellectuals, physicians, and
politicians who are even less disposed to independent thought. These cogs
perform admirably as men of business, entrepreneurs, financiers, bankers,
abattoir workers, car salesmen, and such, but I possess none of the optimism or
delusion required for success in these professions.

This charming mismatch of my
personality with my surroundings has lent me with a colorful personality replete
with the usual peeves and eccentricities that one can expect from such an
individual. For example, I adore things like poetry, opera, cats, herbal tea,
old films, and long novels. I claim to be preoccupied by such things as
“politics,” “ideas,” and “morality.” I am obsessed by manias that I call
“freedom” or “liberty,” “peace” and “love.” I am also not without my philistine
interests, including but not limited to: comic books, trashy horror films,
chocolates, football, and television. These things, taken as a whole, lend me
the titular character of an iconoclast. That is a curmudgeon, a crank, a kook
who belongs to the Neolithic past yet finds himself adrift in the technocratic
age with no recourse but to become a mad, bearded, muttering hermit.

But, dear reader, have no fear. I am
a congenial enough hermit who adores having visitors in my cave. I will offer
you a cup of tea and a place by my fire if you are willing enough to hear the
tangential yarns of a young man who has addled too early but is not without a
misplaced, youthful sense of optimism. Along the way you may meet my lovely,
adoring fiancée and our sweet little daughter, my various friends and
relations, maybe even my two cats, Ozzie and Satchmo. You never can tell.

We will discuss many things without
the stuffy formalities of form and structure; anything from politics and
religion to film, books, and current events. We will cover anything and
everything that my obsessive fancy happens to light upon, and perhaps have a
few laughs along the way. Questions? Comments? Post freely and often. Look, my
dears, we are very near the end. Thank you for coming and you are most welcome.
Salutations, salutations, salutations.